Environmentalist dreams of green Christmas

BY ALEX WILLIAMSTHE NEW YORK TIMES

Sunday

Nov 25, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 25, 2007 at 6:52 AM

Last Christmas, Donna Hoffman, an ardent environmentalist who lives in Austin, Texas, came up with an unlikely gift for each member of her family: an energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb.
"I wanted to connect through the gift-giving tradition," said Hoffman, 45, who works as a coordinator for the Sierra Club. "I also wanted to communicate my own deeply-felt environmental conviction."
In particular, Hoffman said, she hoped to make a point to her sister, Cynda Reznicek, who works for a construction company that builds "a lot of nasty, old-style fossil fuel-related stuff," including highways and coal-fired electricity plants.
While Reznicek, 50, found the light bulb an amusing gift, and even useful (she has since replaced all the incandescent bulbs in her house), she said she wondered if the holidays were the time to preach austerity.
"We spent so many years so poor, where we didn't have the money to do much," Reznicek said. Now that she and her husband, Steve, a lawyer, are doing better financially, "we're at the point now where we can be a little more extravagant," she said. "It's just a joy." Cut back now? With all due respect to her sister, Reznicek said, "We thought she was nuts."
Frivolity versus severity. Materialism versus sacrifice. Welcome to the "green" holidays.
The holidays always have been an emotionally combustible time for families, bringing together a sometimes volatile mix of siblings, crotchety grandparents and ill-behaved children. But in recent years, a new figure has joined the celebration, to complicate the proceedings even further: the green evangelist of the family - the impassioned activist bent on eradicating the wasteful materialism of the holidays.
Otherwise known, at least to skeptical traditionalists, as the new Grinch.
This Grinch is not out to spoil Christmas, but merely to use it as a platform to advocate ecological responsibility. Perhaps emboldened by the "Live Earth" benefit concerts and Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, this is the family member who is the first to point out, over the bountiful Christmas dinner, that the 2.6 billion holiday cards sold each year in the United States could fill a landfill the size of a football field 10 stories high, or that those conventional lights on the Christmas tree contribute up to nine times as much greenhouse-gas emissions as the leaner-burning LED models; or that some Christmas-tree growers use as many as 40 different pesticides, as well as chemical colorants, on their crops.
The question that an increasing number of families face is whether the proselytizing green member of the clan adds spice to the proceeding, like, say, a cup of whiskey in a bowl of eggnog, or an explosive element, like that same cup of whiskey tossed into the fire on Christmas morning.
It's not just the greens who feel this emotional tug at the end of the year: A 2005 survey by the Center for a New American Dream showed that 78 percent of Americans wish the holidays were "less materialistic."
At the same time, the average American spends about $900 on presents each year, according to the National Retail Federation.
Still, to some ears, the call for less excessive consumption during the holidays sounds almost un-American.
"The point of the holidays for many people is the joy people get in giving," said Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar on environmental issues at the American Enterprise Institute. Environmentalists who scold their families are simply making "ritualistic gestures that won't solve the problem," he said.
The concept of a green holiday is so new, said Amanda Freeman, a founder of the environmental Web site Vitaljuicedaily.com, that no one has yet codified the etiquette. "I think you have to watch the line between giving people helpful tips they may not know about, and criticizing everything they do," she said.
The drama is heightened because "everyone already feels pressure this time of year," said Pauline Wallin, a clinical psychologist in Camp Hill, Pa., "The roads are more crowded, the malls are more crowded. There are expectations to be nice to people you don't necessarily like. When somebody comes in and starts preaching, it's one more thing they have to think about."
Indeed, Claire Roby, a senior majoring in environmental studies at American University in Washington, said she is already preparing for conflict when she travels home to Oklahoma this Christmas. Roby plans to spread the green message with the gifts she gives: handmade clocks made from discarded CDs and scavenged electronic components, wrapped in newspaper.
"We'll see how much we can avoid a dinner table argument this year," Roby, 22, said. "There's always that uncle or grandfather who knows what you care passionately about and is going to say anything he can to rile you up."
Wallin said that environmental activists can avoid arguments by trying to lead by example, not by lecture. "Don't force them to change," she said. "It may take two or three seasons, but you are not going to get anywhere by showing up and thumbing your nose."
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(Anxious greens can consult the Sierra Club's Web site, which provides actual scripts to recite during dinner-table debates. For example, when "Aunt Mim" shrugs off global warming, the activist might respond: "A delicate balance has been thrown out of whack, and the consequences are really rather frightening. At this pace, Mim, we could see an ice-free Arctic by midcentury.")
Jenni Skyler, a sex and relationship counselor from Miami, said she already achieved results this year by shifting her strategy away from guilt trips.
This year, Skyler, 26, decided to cap off a year in which she moved from Florida to ecologically conscious Boulder, Colo., and gave up her car for a bike, with an all-out assault on holiday waste.
When Skyler first floated the idea to her family of replacing all presents with time donated to charity, she faced resistance. "They'd give me grief," she said. "They'd say, 'Those are your values, not ours."'
So Skyler wrote a passionate letter to the family, detailing her own conversion, spurred by concerns about global warming. She hoped others would follow suit.
When her stepsister started to show interest in the proposal, Skyler recalled, her father joked, "When you sell your engagement ring, we can talk about fighting consumerism."
But after lengthy conversations, her stepmother, Mercy Bach, a state judge, finally brokered a compromise. She suggested the family trade chores and services, not material gifts.
"I'm really looking forward to simplifying and not having to go to all the malls to buy 10 Christmas presents," Bach said. "I think it's going to be a relief."
It remains to be seen if that view will ever come to prevail among the most vocal champions of conspicuous yuletide consumption: children.
Victoria Perla, the author of the children's book "When Santa Turned Green" (Plan G) and a mother of two, said she tried to introduce her children to an ecologically conscious holiday by increments.
With children, Perla said: "You don't need to take them along in baby steps. Kids can learn faster than that."
Still, she said: "If you turn around and say this Christmas is going to be 180 degrees different from every Christmas you've ever had, that wouldn't be fair, or realistic. You have to bring them along slowly."
In her own family, Perla said she read her children her book - in which Santa's home at the North Pole is melted by global warming - before bed, but also conditioned them to anticipate experiential gifts, as well as robes and slippers for the winter when she keeps her thermostat down. Already, she said, her daughter, Julia, 6, has dozed off "absolutely wired up, talking about her green ideas, speaking about carbon dioxide correctly."
Perla's 10-year-old son, Paul, who routinely used Christmas to stock up on the latest electronic toys, also sounded convinced.
"You don't have to wrap your presents and stuff," he said. "You waste paper by doing that. And sometimes there's a lot better things than toys, like if you got taken to a really good show."
The same may be true for adults as well. Last year, Kristine Gardner, 31, a Pilates teacher who lives in Pacific Palisades, Calif., decided to go green for the holidays with her husband, Scott, who works for a private equity firm and specializes in the renewable energy field. They gave their extended family donations to TerraPass, a company that allows motorists to buy carbon offsets for their cars, and gave each other donations to charity in lieu of traditional presents.
"It's taken me a little while to adjust to it," Gardner admitted, "because I'm one who would like to wake up on Christmas morning and get a new pair of Jimmy Choos, or a new iPod."
But, Gardner said, "My husband has helped educate me on that."
More or less.
"I probably wouldn't return the Jimmy Choos," she said about this year. "But I won't cry if I don't get them."
Amanda Freeman
A founder of the environmental Web site Vitaljuicedaily.com
"I think you have to watch the line between giving people helpful tips they may not know about, and criticizing everything they do."

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